A long time ago, in a world that now seems far, far away, the summer movie season was divided as it is now: movies for adults and movies for kids.
For kids, summer movies usually signified something youthful and sunny, sexy and fizzy, the cinematic equivalent of a chocolate soda with two straws. Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon on the beach. Elvis. Gidget. Disney cartoons for tots. Horror movies with Vincent Price, sci-fi and westerns on the drive-in screens.
For adults, it meant movies much like the ones they watched all year round: serious dramas, romantic comedies, other genre movies and adaptations of famous novels and plays the movie studios had been turning out regularly ever since the early talkie days of the late 1920s.
But back then, in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, it was the adult movies that ruled the major studios, the marketing campaigns and the box office. Not anymore. Kids, in particular male teenagers, have become the target audience.
The line of demarcation, of course, was that mid-’70s “Jaws”–“Star Wars” explosion, the box-office revolution that altered the big studio’s conception of their movie audience.
“The big thing is in the wake of `Jaws’ and `Star Wars’ came the realization that people might go back to see a movie more than once and there’s no better time to hope that than during the summer, when people take time off and kids are out of school,” says film author and historian Leonard Maltin.
Teen genre movies now dominate the calendar not only in the summer, but year round, with incredible special effects, top casts and budgets of $60 million to nearly $200 million (see “Titanic”).
Viewed from that angle, Summer 1997 seems to offer the movie business as usual: a flashy high-tech roster of superheroes (“Hercules,” “Batman and Robin”), fireball action (“Air Force One,” “Face/Off”), horror and sci-fi (“Contact,” “Men in Black”), sequels to old hits and superhits (“Speed 2: Cruise Control,” “Home Alone 3,” “Free Willy 3”) and, last and often least, recycled version of old TV shows (“Leave It to Beaver,” “George of the Jungle”).
“There used to be movies with literally summer themes, like `A Summer Place,’ ” Maltin says. “Now anything big and brainless qualifies as a summer movie.”
For adults and teenagers, the summers of 1960 to 1962, for example, probably meant checking out the gruesome doings at the Bates Motel in “Psycho,” Or hanging on the cliffs with Gregory Peck, David Niven and Tony Quinn just below the “Guns of Navarone.” Or standing up with a hundred slave warriors all brazenly insisting “I am Spartacus!”
“Psycho” and “Spartacus” are now considered classics and “The Guns of Navarone” was reverently restored only a few years ago. But even if you quibble about the artistic stature of those movies — each the reigning box-office hit of its summer — you can’t really question their intent. They were all primarily for adults.
So were most of the big summer hits before 1960 and practically every one from 1960 to 1973. Looking over that list (see accompanying story), summons up an era shockingly remote from our own. In the last 13 years, the No. 1 box office champs include three “Batman” movies, “The Karate Kid, Part II” an (admittedly brilliant) cartoon/live action feature (“Who Framed Roger Rabbit”) and the usual sci-fi, action and horror.
But on that later list are only three movies which, even charitably, seem geared for adults: the gangster chronicle “The Untouchables,” the romantic comedy fantasy “Ghost” and America’s favorite, “Forrest Gump.”
What of the movie box office champs after 1960? On that list, we find two literate historical spectaculars (1960’s “Spartacus” and 1963’s “Cleopatra’) and three sophisticated, well-written modern sex comedies from writers Woody Allen (1965’s “What’s New, Pussycat?” and 1972’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)”) and Jules Feiffer (1971’s “Carnal Knowledge”).
There were three faithful adaptations of major contemporary American novels (1969’s “Midnight Cowboy,” 1970’s “Catch-22” and 1972’s “Deliverance”), and two adaptations of plays generally considered high points in modern American drama (1966’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and comedy (1968’s “The Odd Couple”). And mass audience genre movies too: a rousing best seller World War II adventure adaptation (1961’s “The Guns of Navarone”), a rowdy musical (1964’s “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” with Debbie Reynolds), and movies that set standards for macho action (1967’s “The Dirty Dozen”) and horror (1960’s “Psycho”).
Some all-time classic performances grace some of these films: especially Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as the doomed hustlers in “Midnight Cowboy,” Jack Nicholson with his explosive rage and misanthropy in “Carnal Knowledge,” nervous Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in “Psycho,” Peter Sellers as the Freudian-or-Jungian psychiatrist of “What’s New, Pussycat?” and the entire four-actor ensemble of “Virginia Woolf.” The directors were a glittering bunch including now generally revered luminaries like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Mankiewicz, John Boorman, John Schlesinger, Robert Aldrich, Woody Allen and (three times) Mike Nichols.
Back then, people probably didn’t appreciate the level of movie — and especially the level of screenwriting — they were regularly getting in movie theaters. Critics complained, as they often do, that the projects were promising but fatally compromised by sex, violence or Hollywood glamor.
In the 1960s, we were still a nation largely of separate communities. Today, we’re a global network, linked by huge communications systems. What’s different is the approach, intent and impact of what we see. And most of all, the incredibly high stakes. Today, the summer movie season is less a vacation break than an economic war of monumental proportions.
Careers and studios hang in the balance. Financiers quake, flacks attack and agents scurry. Whole armies of filmmakers take the field, backed by creative planners and supported by logistics commando teams of publicists and marketers.
The bloody, popcorn-strewn battlefield, the thousands of theaters across the country (and eventually, around the world), has become a Waterloo with Twizzlers and Raisinettes.
And that movie war now includes, sadly, fewer outdoor theaters and many multiplexes. Where summer movies once had bold aspirations of generating a few million dollars, movies these days may be considered disasters if they pull in “only” $100 million.
I miss those old movie summers. Especially the drive-ins. I miss the lines at the snack bars and the silly concession commercials with cha-chaing popcorn boxes.
The difference is this: In those days, I wanted to see the adult movies far more than the ones “meant” for me. Now, of course, I miss those as well.
But then, maybe like movie hater/lover Holden Caulfield of “A Catcher in the Rye,” I tend to mourn almost everything about my teenage years. And kids these days will probably miss this upcoming summer — the season of “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” “George of the Jungle” and “Batman and Robin” — with just as much intensity 30 years from now.
Why shouldn’t they? In the eyes of many big studio executives, most of the screens still belong to them.
